Houston, you have a rival... with ground control in Guildford: SSTL boss Patrick Wood on why the UK needs to invest in knowing how to use space
Patrick Wood is an unlikely looking space pioneer, but the sober-suited boss of Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd heads the world’s pre-eminent small satellite provider.
It is the kind of company the UK needs a lot more of if it is to reach the Government’s ambitious targets for its space programme. Now majority-owned by the aircraft giant Airbus it has come a long way from its roots as a University of Surrey spin-out 30 years ago.
The university still retains a small stake. ‘People come to us as the global leader in small satellites because we started it in 1985,’ said Wood, pictured left. ‘Since then we’ve launched 47 satellites.’
Surrey Satellite Technology boss Patrick Wood believes satellites will be increasingly useful in remote areas
Their smallest weighs the same as a laptop computer and the largest is the weight of a van.
The possible applications have enormous potential and include monitoring disaster zones, deforestation, drought and flooding.
The company has a role in Galileo, the £3billion European navigation system being built as an upgrade to America’s GPS network.
SSTL has a factory and space centre with 490 staff in Guildford, Surrey, and a UK turnover of £100 million.
The company has opened a branch in Denver, Colorado, as the industry booms. I met Wood as he manned a very busy exhibition stand at the Small Satellite Conference at Utah State University in Logan.
‘It’s a great time,’ he says. ‘I’ve built lots of spacecraft in my life, but now we are having to put all the technology into a much smaller spacecraft so the technological challenges are much harder. Customers are really pushing to have huge amounts of functionality in quite small spacecraft.’
Wood believes satellites will be increasingly useful in remote areas such as oceans, for tracking and routing ships, monitoring oil spills, the atmosphere and weather – and even tracking boats full of migrants.
As SSTL grows, an increasing number of start-ups want to follow in its footsteps. ‘Space geeks’ have taken over Utah State University’s campus and the university hums with the sound of entrepreneurs discussing ‘small sats’ and comparing hardware.
Wood says a company like SSTL can help start-ups, working with the Government agencies Innovate UK and the UK Space Agency to create opportunities to fly their payload on one of its larger craft.
Despite the challenges, Wood feels the UK is well positioned to reach the Government’s target to expand Britain’s share of the expected £400billion global space-enabled market to 10 per cent by 2030.
‘The UK now needs to invest in knowing how to use space, not necessarily in knowing how to build the hardware that goes into space,’ he said.
And he argued we need to do more to promote it. Wood said: ‘If I go back 15 or 20 years it was very scientific or institutionalised, so didn’t necessarily have a wide appeal. Now all of us in the space industry, we understand the importance of promoting it. I think we’re beginning to see a kind of positive spiral.’
At last, it seems, Britain is reaching for the stars.
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